THE WINTER BALL
Late February · Cipriani South Street, New York · An Evening · Since 1952
The Winter Ball is the New York Junior League’s night, held at the end of February in black tie for a thousand people. It has run since 1952.
What it raises goes to the League’s volunteer training and to some sixty organisations working across the city.
The Founder
Mary Harriman was nineteen years old in 1901 and the daughter of one of the richest men in America. Her father owned railroads.
She had been down to the settlement houses on the Lower East Side and concluded that young women of her position ought to be doing the work rather than writing cheques for it. She gathered a group of them and formed the Junior League for the Promotion of Settlement Movements.
The idea travelled. There are some three hundred Junior Leagues now, and the New York League still puts two and a half thousand volunteers into the city.
The Winter Ball has paid for it since 1952.
The Evening
Black tie, and it is kept.
The benefactors’ reception opens at six. Cocktails, then dinner, then the awards. The League gives its highest honours to sustainers and volunteers on the night, and the presentation is why a good part of the room is there.
A live auction follows. Then dessert and dancing from half past nine, to a band, and it runs late.
What to Know
There are two ways in. The full evening, taken by table or by benefactor ticket, and a separate ticket for dessert and dancing from half past nine at a fraction of the cost. Most people do not know the second exists.
Tables sell out, and the higher tiers go first.
It is a working organisation’s night rather than a society photograph. The women being honoured have put in years of unpaid hours, and the awards are the substance of the evening rather than an interruption to it.
The mistake is arriving for the party and missing the awards. The dancing is good. The reason for the dancing is better.
The Court
The Winter Ball is not the Court’s own. Tables, benefactor places and seating are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of the evening: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward.
